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Comment by pbhjpbhj | Hacker News Reader

There are some short "googlewhacks" (though they are multiple words) in there:

* collective pause to think

* pure-ad parked

These suggest to me a [highly proficient] non-native speaker too. "pause for thought" and "pure ad-parked" are correct versions.

* "intimate patterns" is an unusual turn of phrase in this context, would probably be "personal usage patterns"

* "high-end criminals" looks like an unusual hyphenation

This search gives a name - http://www.google.com/search?q=%22identity+management%22+roi....

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"high-end criminals" isn't unusual. Certainly not to these British eyes. If you Google for "high end criminals" even without the hyphen, about half of the results use the hyphenated version.

The other things you point out encourage me to share your opinion, however.

Google's regular search doesn't handle hyphenation but Trends appears to: http://www.google.com/trends?q=%22high-end%22%2C%22high+end%.... Google searches give me results which suspect this Trend search is not sound however.

I'm from the UK too.

The problem is context, a common issue with tracking things with Google Trends in particular. Tracking programming language usage with it, for example, has been a nightmare ("ruby" and "python" having far too many meanings, but few write "ruby programming").

"high end" has more uses than "high-end." For example, "I bought a car at the high end of my budget." In that case, "high-end" wouldn't make sense. In "datacenters have been targeted by high-end criminals," however, "high-end" is a compound adjective.

Alternatively, you could drop the hyphen and/or form an entirely new word: "highend." The word "highend" doesn't seem to have caught on yet, though. I suspect that's because "upmarket" covers the same meaning already and is less susceptible to these morphological mishaps.

(On seeing what OS X had to suggest as a correction for "highend," it suggested both "high end" and "high-end.")

It's a blunt tool, agreed. But it was supposed to be a simple indicator only, not a measure.

From reading the original post, I think that "intimate patterns" was a stylistic choice, meaning to emphasize the invassivness of this phenomonon

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